The giant statue of the gray marble lion rising from a mound of green grass up into the sky on the Waterloo Battlefield is what one immediately perceives upon arriving there. It dominates your attention to the exclusion of everything else like some giant behemoth appearing in front of you. Especially on a gray day it’s more than vaguely disconcerting and even frightening. It could scare a child. You’d have a hard time explaining to him it wasn’t a bronze man or an armed warrior rising from the serpent’s teeth planted in the ground in Jason and the Argonauts. It reminds me of one of the Assyrian lions at the British Museum even though it was put there by the King of the Netherlands to make you remember his wounded son. You might forget Napoleon but you won’t forget the lion.
